Date of Completion: 05/07/2020
I stopped reading this book just under halfway. Personally, I am surprised that I even got that far.
I really tried to finish this book mainly because I paid full price for a new copy from Amazon. Sadly, after avoiding eye contact with it for more than a week, I decided to call it quits and pick up another book.
Too many books. Too few centuries.
The sad thing is the premise of this book is something that I should find irresistible in theory. There’s a kick-ass female character, a school for assassins, betrayals, and lots of humour. So, what went wrong?
This quote sums up my feelings perfectly:
I appear to have misplaced the f***s I give
I was so bored! Each time I picked up this book I had to dig deep for cares to give. Any interest I had when starting this book was quickly smothered by the heavy, bizarre writing.
Don’t get me wrong, there is no doubt that Jay Kristoff is a very talented writer – I just think that he tried to do too much in one book.
For instance, I absolutely loved the start of the first chapter. Here, Jay creatively portrayed two different events using similar descriptions and dialogue. The first scenario was really intriguing and I was amazed at the creativity and originality of the writing. The second scenario was even more mind-blowing as I was surprised that Jay could successfully repeat such a unique writing style. However, by the third and fourth scenarios I had lost my awe and had to check that the whole book was not written in this manner.
That was just the first chapter and I was already tired of the writing!
As the storyline progressed, unfortunately, the writing got increasingly tedious. I found myself having to look up a few unfamiliar and uncommon words. To make things worse, Jay incorporates several made-up words which the reader has to decode. This is acceptable when it occurs every now and then but having to do this constantly simply made me feel stupid and made the storyline unengaging.
The eccentric writing also made the storyline very convoluted and made it difficult for me to connect with the characters. Every single action and scene was cloaked in so many descriptions, it took a lot of mental energy to process anything.
If her face were a puzzle, most would put it back in the box, unfinished.
And don’t even get me started on the footnotes!
I definitely think that Jay took the easy way out by having most of the world-building in the footnotes. This came across as an information dump and I ended up ignoring them because they did not add much to the core storyline. At least half of these footnotes could have been left out – but who knows maybe they were all relevant to the storyline later in the book.
Despite all my complains, I did found the writing to be surprising hilarious. There were definitely a few moments where an unexpected joke made me laugh out loud. Whilst these moments were insufficient to save the book, they did bump up my rating from a flat-out 1 star to 1.5 stars.
Here is truth, gentlefriends: when in doubt, it’s best to be polite when dealing with lunatics.
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